


Fear is Only In Your Mind

by TriffidsandCuckoos



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Altered Mental States, Body Horror, DGHDA Halloween Mini Bang, Dreams, Horror, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, In a decidedly supernatural way, Injury Recovery, Lovecraftian, M/M, Possession, Post-Season/Series 02, Supernatural Elements, This Is Halloween, Todd Brotzman is not okay, Trippy, Unreliable senses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-03 21:35:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21186344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TriffidsandCuckoos/pseuds/TriffidsandCuckoos
Summary: The universe has found a body for communicating. Todd Brotzman is having really weird dreams. An innate connection to the universe means reality isn't quite what it seems for everyone else.





	Fear is Only In Your Mind

**Author's Note:**

> Title paraphrasing 'Sweet Sacrifice' by Evanescence because I am that early '00s moody bitch.
> 
> Massive thanks to [FlightinFlame](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flightinflame/pseuds/flightinflame)and [dont-offend-the-bees](https://dont-offend-the-bees.tumblr.com/), both of whom were hugely supportive in getting this fic written/in any state to be posted. No thanks to BBC Sounds for not telling me until basically a couple of days before posting that it had a Lovecraft adaptation with Samuel Barnett, which would have helped considerably. (It's called The Case of Charles Dexter Reed, go check it out!)
> 
> dont-offend-the-bees also did some incredible horror art [here](https://dont-offend-the-bees.tumblr.com/post/188610514332/tis-the-season-of-spookiness-and-the-halloween)! I've embedded one of them at the end of the fic but go look at both and send compliments because we've been in an endless cycle of spooky inspiration and it's been great.

When you’re the universe, resurrection isn’t any harder than shape-shifting or deciding who should die. It’s all just atoms in the end. And the universe doesn’t even have to breathe.

\---

If it was just the record player, that'd be fine. Todd found it on a case, doing dumpster diving because this is just the most glamorous job he could hope for (still better as a pick-up line than bellboy though), so no wonder if it's a piece of crap. First it lets out this scratching sound every other song, then more and more, until it won't stop skipping even though he checks and checks and the records are _fine_. Whatever. Can't trust what you find in a dumpster, unless it’s Dirk.

Except his phone – his, what, third phone this month, Farah just produces them and it's just as well really – the sound on there keeps fucking up too. Skipping forward, then back, then different songs altogether. There's music in his headphones he can't name, even though something in him seems to recognise it, knowing the next beat before it happens. Probably yet another one-hit band from the nineties, the whispery effect doesn't fit but maybe it’s a Marilyn Manson rip-off thing.

He lost a load of his CDs when he had to do a runner from, well, kind of everyone, so he can't check those. (Whoever looted his old place at the Ridgely had better be appreciating that collection.) There's this old iPod he did grab on the run because he was going pretty insane with nothing but the car radio and a phone which occasionally might be persuaded to play Snake. It’s much less surprising that that piece of shit breaking down, although at least sometimes it puts out sound even when the screen’s faded out. 

The radio in the car keeps blasting static at him, hissing and sometimes screams which make him jump and swear because what the fuck even is the Midwest? He’s heard the radio stations get weird but this seems pretty unnecessary. Isn't it supposed to be evangelicals? Or is that the South? Todd's not great at other places, full stop.

Farah's hand clamps down on his as he twists the knob so hard it almost snaps off. "Todd. I'm – I'm going to need you to stop doing that."

"Just trying to find something to listen to."

"I know," she says, in that steady soothing voice which usually means she is this close to losing her shit. He's never quite sure if it's meant for the other person or for her. He just hopes it works. "But if you switch stations like that one more time I might – I don't think it would be a good idea." Her finger taps just once against the wheel, more careful and deliberate than anyone actually taps in real life. "Or could you maybe not run through them all at once? That would also be good."

Right. "Just – Have you heard this stuff?" Kind of a redundant question, maybe, but that's never stopped him. "I know the Midwest is weird but what's with all the screaming?"

Farah blinks a few times at the road ahead. "Um, what – what screaming, Todd?"

"On the radio!" He points a helpful finger at it to distinguish it from all the other non-existent radios in their vicinity. "Dirk, help me out – fuck." Dirk is still passed out in the back seat under the standard Mona blanket. "How does he sleep through anything? do you think it's a universe thing?"

"Maybe," Farah says, and, "Todd, none of those stations had screaming on them."

"Sure they did."

"I'm fairly certain I would have noticed that, Todd."

Todd tries laughing, only it goes about as well as that ever does, where if he's lucky he sounds like a squeaky toy and if he's not he sounds like a possessed squeaky toy. "No, it was right there – " He twists the dial to where he last heard it. A man with an enviously rich voice tells him about the weather.

"Right. Not there."

High school football results. Evangelical preacher (he knew it). More weather, different this time, now annoyingly perky.

"Wait, the fuck – "

All the voices are blurring, voices and static as he scrolls up and down, faster even though he can see Farah's hands tightening out of the corner of his eye. Blasts of electric guitars and every kind of sports he isn't interested in, and where the fuck is it?

The car screeches to a halt.

Apparently that's enough to wake up Dirk, _finally_, because as Farah breathes in through the nose and out through the mouth, a tousled mostly-British-maybe head appears between the two front seats. "Are we there?" Dirk asks, then, "Hmm. Interesting choice of stop," and finally, "Is this so we can stretch our legs?" which is when Farah slams the door open and gets out, seatbelt snapping so fast Dirk's head jerks back again.

Todd should feel bad about it. He will, as soon as he can find the goddamn screaming.

"What are you looking for, Todd?"

"There was – " Todd hesitates. While he wouldn't say he has a crush on Dirk, because that would probably get himself diagnosed with Stockholm Syndrome, he wouldn't be opposed to Dirk having a crush on him and talking about screaming radios doesn't seem all that conducive to that idea, despite Dirk's usual weirdness. Todd is supposed to be something like a beacon of normality around here, cue the laughter track.

Dirk raises his eyebrows, beaming helpfully, and then turns that beam on the radio. "Did you hear a clue?"

"Wouldn't you hear it?" Todd asks.

"Maybe that’s why I woke up," Dirk suggests, which probably is more likely than something as normal as just braking hard in the middle of nowhere. "What did you hear?"

Todd would like to lie. Todd would always like to lie, that's why he tries not to, but it feels even more important here. Unfortunately, Dirk looks just so innocent and so expectant that it's like he accesses bits of Todd's brain without Todd having any say in the matter.

"I heard...screaming."

"And?"

He stares. Dirk just blinks at him, still beaming.

"Dirk, there was...screaming. On the radio."

"Is it still there?"

"I – No, I – You don't seem that bothered about this."

"Well, that's just radios, isn't it?" Dirk says with the full force of his Britishness which somehow bullshits so many people into letting him talk about stuff like he knows what it actually is that he's talking about. "Static, screaming, sports – Lots of Ss actually, I wonder why." And he hmmed to himself, while Todd just stared at him and decided the screaming right now was definitely just happening inside his own head.

\---

Since Dirk crawled through his window and towed in the universe behind him, Todd’s learnt to let go of a lot of his definitions of ‘normal behavior’. That means that, in his own way, if he isn’t expecting Dirk to answer the door to their office before anyone knocks, he isn’t exactly surprised either.

Still talking over that sugary mush he insists on calling ‘tea’, Dirk extracts his long spindly legs up from their couch and cushion configuration, ambles over to the door, and pulls it open to reveal someone standing there. And then Dirk's spine abruptly freezes into a solid line that means something much worse than a case or a human being with a complaint about social interactions. The Blackwing sort of worse.

Todd doesn’t so much rush to his side as fling himself bodily across the room, only dimly aware of crashing sounds behind him which suggest nothing good about the lamp that they (Dirk) had found in a skip outside their building. Fuck whether it’s Priest or some other bogeyman ready to drag Dirk back to that place, Todd’s ready, the same way he always is, even if all he can do is absorb a load of punches while Dirk makes a getaway. His hands are already in fists, his vision narrowing, and the adrenaline’s hot in his head.

Only then he actually looks at the guy’s eyes.

Todd had those eyes once.

Todd doesn’t know him (he assumes – from the way his black shirt is clinging Todd could see the two of them having had sex a while back but he’d rather not ask that in front of Dirk), from the pieces of what might have once been a pretty nice black suit before all the dirt and blood through to the clinging strands of blond hair and the dazed set to his face. This is the real world – Todd's in pain because he bashed his leg into a stupidly solid second-hand-squared lamp, not because he's helping tear a hole in reality – and Todd is seeing those eyes not by the light of the universe but the Farah-regulation lightbulb of their very normal office (for their not very normal job).

It's bad enough watching your sister's pupils bleed out at the edges, spreading like ink in water and somehow knowing – maybe through her eyes, maybe through different eyes altogether – that the same thing is happening to yours. Something alien blinking inside both your heads. That had been different though: a literal world of pain waiting for them, screaming muffled in the background, and they hadn't been alone because they'd been each other, sneaking backstage to the whole damn universe. 

Sometimes he remembers it and it’s like he’s back there; other times he thinks the whole thing was one big pararibulitis attack. He doesn’t want to ask Amanda either way.

Those eyes move from Dirk to Todd, or rather the head holding them moves, and Todd flinches before he fully registers why. He’s met a lot of weird people in less than a year – a _lot_ of weird people – so someone just moving their head shouldn’t startle him. Just, there’s this really jerky quality to it, like a bird or a puppet or a Tim Burton fever dream. Todd's not sure whether he actually hears the click of clockwork or his brain just supplies it. (That’s a better sound than a literal snap.) Those eyes lock on Todd’s, unquestionably the same, before the head they’re sitting in rights itself smoothly and shapes its mouth into the objectively dumbest grin Todd's ever seen.

The person Todd sincerely hopes is not their latest client says, “Hi?”

Todd is very very distracted by a hand suddenly finding his and clinging on. Still, it’s his job to do the things Dirk can’t, and even if Dirk is a dumb sort of height that makes Todd shielding him fairly pointless, it’s the thought that counts. “Who are you?”

“Oh, um.” The guy frowns deeply, and the silence stretches out way past the point where it’s funny. His head clicks from side to side like a metronome and Todd might be trying to back Dirk up, except Dirk won’t move. “You know when something’s on the tip of your tongue? What’s the point of it being there?”

Dirk says something wordless.

“What was that?”

A murmur that possibly ends in ‘kin’.

The guy points at him, practically punches the air, and Todd’s hand yanks back as Dirk leaps away. “Right! Friedkin!”

“You know him?”

“He was at Blackwing,” Dirk says. “He was – ” Then he raises his voice. “I’m not going back.”

“Oh, me neither, dude,” Friedkin says, holding his hands up. “That place is _fucked up_, like, _seriously_.” The pouting really clashes with the eyes, just sitting there, watching. “Not with them now. Obviously. Like, he – ” He shrugs. “He pushed me through that swirling portal thing? And then some stuff, and, er, I found myself here?”

“’And then some stuff’,” Todd echoes slowly.

“Yeah.”

“And you want us to…” It’s hard to make sentences when your brain just keeps playing ‘and then some stuff’ on loop. “What do you want?”

Friedkin scratches at his head like that might dislodge a thought. “I don’t know how I got here? I didn’t know you were in here, I just thought….” He trails off, that frown from straining for his name digging in deep again. “How – Didn’t that guy – Ken – didn’t he shoot me?” He pats at his shirt, at the dried bloodstain. “How did I – 

“**He was dead. He was convenient.**”

Todd does not leap into Dirk’s arms. Nor does Dirk leap into his. Possibly this is because they both try it at the same time and so only manage to flail into each other and away from whatever is in front of them.

The guy – Friedkin – looks the same. That includes the eyes, although suddenly it’s like they’re drawing him in closer, faster. That might just be the fear, though. The voice was not because of the fear. If anything, the voice _was_ the fear.

Still the same mouth moving. But a voice with other voices behind it, a ringing in your ears like someone’s shouted right at you, and a definite tingle in Todd’s head like when people speak French, as if what he just heard was not in a language he understands in the slightest. Friedkin is still standing there, only now he is dead still (shitty choice of words), like a wind might send his body swaying but that’s it, with the same blank expression as when Dirk first answered the door. Not the same guy who was talking before.

As much as Todd doesn’t want to hear that voice ever again, he was bracing himself for it to carry on. He wasn’t expecting Dirk to speak instead.

“You can’t be here.” It’s not the Blackwing sort of scared – the sort that makes Dirk wake up in the back of the car with his hand clamped over his mouth. The kind that makes his eyes go wide like a child. “You’ve never been here.” 

Todd wishes this was a Blackwing thing. At least then Dirk would just be scared.

Todd’s seen Dirk both alight with wonder and ready to launch back into his personal hell. He never thought he’d see both at once.

"Sorry," Todd says, not sorry at all but he just needs a word there, a word to cut between them. "Who the fuck are you?"

"Dude," the guy says, "I thought – "

"Not you," Todd interrupts, really not ready to hear the word 'like' a thousand times in a minute. "The – The other one."

"What are you – " Friedkin starts to say, before the sound strangles and there's an odd double-effect, Yanni/Laurel on a whole new level. If he was feeling kind, Todd would say it's like when you're driving on the freeway and you get the radio between two stations or you cross the state line. He's not feeling kind. It sounds like when he tried to prove he could edit songs. Friedkin – his body – coughs, something so human that somehow that feels like nails scraping down reality. Nothing comes up, not normal phlegm or black gunk, and he shakes his head ('the' head?) in a way which isn’t clicking anymore but now it’s too fluid. More like seaweed tangling around the propeller.

“The universe.” 

The voice says it too, so Todd doesn’t realise at first that he heard that in Dirk’s voice. When he looks, Dirk’s shoulders have dropped and he just sort of looks resigned. 

It's so close to what people usually say these days when pretty much anything happens that Todd's more confused by how little that explains anything. "Wait, like – you were sent by the universe?"

"**I sent myself,**" he says, although it sort of sounds like there might also be a space in the middle of that last word.

Dirk lets out this high-pitched sound which is either a hysterical giggle or a balloon deflating under duress. Possibly both, from the way he abruptly collapses against his desk.

"Dirk," Todd says, "just because he says that, it doesn't mean – "

"**He knows.**"

"That's – " Todd really doesn't like the shaking that's building up in Dirk's limbs; crosses the room in barely three steps to grab him by the arms, force him to look at him. Dirk's eyes keep drifting over his shoulder and it's all Todd can do not to shake him himself. "Dirk. This is bullshit, right?" He doesn't mean for the question to be there. Something feels like it's licking at his back like flames, a sense, a presence, something stronger now he doesn't have his eyes helping his brain to lie about what's in the room. "This guy could be anybody. We have seen a lot of weird shit, a _lot_ of weird shit, so this could just be..."

The words trail off on a delay after his thoughts do. It's like the thing says: Dirk knows, and now so does he.

Dirk clears his throat and gently pushed Todd to the side. "You can't just tell me what to do. I have...an _office_."

There's no expression. "**Do you want me to hire you?**"

"I could refuse," Dirk says quickly, then blinks. "I could – I _am_ refusing you!" He stabs his finger forwards in triumph. "If you're in a person, I can say no to you! I am! I am saying no to you!"

"**There’s been enough interference from that,**," it says, "**and that's how nothing wins.**"

"That doesn't sound so bad," Todd says.

A cheek twitches, the corner of the mouth lifting like a stitch pulled too tight. Either Todd is lame enough to amuse the universe, or it's trying to show humour and failing utterly. Somehow the latter is way more comforting.

"**It's not bad. It's nothing.**"

Friedkin’s fingers flex, each joint clicking, even the ones that shouldn't. The skin stretches out tight and thin. In that crazed detached way that Todd seems to manage when dealing with the way the world works around Dirk, Todd thinks that if the universe wasn’t lying about the being dead thing, Friedkin doesn't look in bad shape at all. Then he thinks about bog bodies and decides to stop thinking. "**Whatever you think about this body, Todd Brotzman, nothing is much worse.**"

\---

Todd's having such strange fucking dreams lately.

No, wait. He's having _fucking strange_ dreams lately. That's – That's started feeling like one of those distinctions he really has to make.

Just, he's not a stranger to his brain mixing together guilt and stress and drugs into one of those paintings Farah can probably name but Todd just knows as college posters when he tried sleeping with someone way higher up the social ladder than him. And with the pararibulitis (and yeah, maybe he could check into what's in the pills but really he'd take them anyway no matter what, they could be laced with heroin or cyanide and he'd take that bet), his brain's finding whole levels of imagination he didn't think he had, even when he thought he was some fucking artist.

These dreams though. These are different.

It's not the kind of imagery you get when your mind decides to think you're being attacked, all the time, constantly. There's something rational about that, the kind where you wake up shaking with nails curled into your palms because men don't scream but you remember what's real by the time the coffee and the pills are in your system. Unlike the old days, there's a leaden sort of inevitability to those dreams – the disease turned up to eleven. Whatever. It's his punishment, he can deal.

Maybe it was Wendimoor – all the weirdness swirling around Dirk shaken up in a blender and blown out the top. At the time, honestly, it had been kind of amazing, seeing all that fantasy crap really exist. Horrifying too, obviously, he almost got _cut in half_, but at least there were good parts, right?

At least now, since setting up the office, the cases have settled down into something which only takes a paragraph to explain rather than multiple whiteboards, and there's a bed and a paycheck at the end (even if they need to start charging _so much more_). The bed might be over the office, but somehow that just adds to the illusion of stability, like everything's coming together. It's definitely what it does for Dirk – you can tell from the way you see him resting his hands against the doorframes or his forehead against the walls when he thinks nobody is watching, his back relaxing so completely that half the time Todd thinks he's about to go to sleep right then and there. Maybe that's what makes Todd calm down too: the reminder of someone so...vibrant (bad choice of words, image, _shit_) coming to a halt. It's only when seeing it that Todd realises just how constant Dirk's motion is: even in their new concept of downtime Dirk is alert, always looking, drumming his fingers, listening. The relaxing is different to the hopelessness and Todd so much prefers it. It's like it calms him down too.

He just wishes the dreams didn't overshadow everything.

Like he said: they’re different. These dreams don't leave him when he wakes up, or when he has coffee, or when he has dinner. They're constantly there. Buzzing in his head and overlaid across everything.

Dirk sleeps right next door to him. It'd be easy to just...go to him, when Todd wakes up with wide eyes not sure what he's even seeing. Dirk's loud and bright and possibly kind of insane (Todd's really not sure on that front), an absolutely impossible person, but at least he has this way of focusing all the impossible on himself. Whenever Todd wakes up, Dirk is the first thought he has. And sure, that's a hideous line and ten years ago he'd have built an entire song around it, but it's also true – not poetic, literally true. 

Todd usually sleeps on his back, but since moving in here he always wakes up on his side, one arm out towards the wall, like he's reaching for something. But that's nothing, really.

You can't just go wandering into someone's room saying you had a bad dream. Todd isn't three years old, not to mention it'd just be fucking weird. Weird enough for Dirk to think so, even, which is when you know it's all got fucked up.

Still. That leaves Todd alone in his room, thinking the shadows are moving, coming closer; thinking there are whispers right at the edge of his hearing; that the walls are moving – not the walls of the room but the walls of _everything_.

Sometimes he looks up, during the day when everything's feeling more liquid than solid, and he swears he can see the universe.

\---

‘Establishing a timeline’ is what Dirk calls it, although he says it with Capital Letters and the kind of self-satisfaction Todd associates with kids who think they're so smart, so it's probably a quote from Farah. From where Todd's standing (on the far side of the room, eyes locked on a wall which features no hellspawn/Blackwing agents), it's more like one of those puzzles you get people who like puzzles, the obnoxious ones which are all red or weird shapes, only this puzzle is from a thrift shop and it's not so much whether pieces are missing as just how many. The guy talks in sentences, sort of, except Todd has no references and Dirk has a few and between them they have no idea what order to put the sentences in.

The one time Dirk convinces Farah to take a weekend to visit her girlfriend and this shit happens. 

(Why did Dirk do that, anyway?)

To be honest, Todd’s mind is mostly occupied with recovering from what happened with the coffee. 

Fuck knows _why_ Dirk offered the alleged universe in their doorway something to drink, since the whole British thing seems to be more like method acting and there really is such a thing as taking it too far and Dirk really isn't Marlon Brando here. (Of course, from the way Dirk doesn't so much speak as squeak like an unoiled gate it's really just Todd's instinctive assholeism making him question it when it’s as valid a mechanism as Todd being awful about everything. ) Friedkin had been smiling as he took a sip, big and wide and breathtakingly dumb. He was still smiling when the twitch had started in the shoulder, of all places. Something small, a tic, but building until the whole arm had been practically jackhammering down. Some of the other limbs joined in, and other parts – the opposite arm had been totally still save for the fingers straightening and contorting independently of each other. Red with traces of black had begun to dribble from his mouth, bubbling like an oil well, and more of it had spilled out in a waterfall as he said, "Do you guys have creamer – "

And then. Well. At least they don't have to clean the carpet. It's gone now.

Instead Todd gets to stare at the massive hole in what was once a carpet which might not have been pretty but it was theirs, and listening to what he can only describe as ‘sentences’, and even then he’s being generous.

"Then, like, _you_ were there, and it was just – " Gesticulating in a thoroughly unhelpful manner, unlike Dirk’s bodily sign language. "There were knights! Why were there – "

And

"I got assigned to this old dude, like, _super old_, at least, like, _forty years old_, and he talked like a crazy person, and it just seemed _so obvious_ that there should be, like, some other way of dealing with you people? Only then you just sat there and were so _boring_ – "

And

"There was, like, _everything_, all overhead, and it was like – I got it, you know? I really got it. And now sometimes I think I get it, but sometimes it all gets blurry and people start talking like they do when your radio goes weird and – "

The guy talks. That's fine, talking is pretty standard around here. It makes Todd's brand of indignant word vomit in the face of danger actually almost rational; fuck, it almost makes Dirk blend in, in a sort of Jackson Pollock way. (Todd is not good at modern art. To him Jackson Pollock is just a useful name to make any joke sound intellectual in a cool way. Mexican Funeral had a whole song named after the guy, one of their most requested, and nobody ever saw through the bullshit.)

One person talking is fine.

What is currently happening is very much not fine. Not even the opposite of fine, unless you want to get into quantum shit. Without the slightest warning, not even a ringing in your ears or a siren or that 'brace brace' voice on planes, the guy's talking in that THOT way of his and then that other voice comes out.

Turns out, now it won’t stop happening, that It's not a voice you hear with your ears. Your body – your _mind_ – wants to think that's what's happening, so at first Todd just figures this is just the normal kind of weird. The one where, okay, a throat and tongue can contort in different ways, the words taking on a thick sludgy sound like he's talking with his mouth full of something Todd doesn't ever want to picture, but still the type of everyday weird that gives you holistic assassins and flying purple people eaters. 

He’s listened to metal, he knows that tinnitus ring in his ears of just wanting the music loud enough to drown out the world and himself, and this is like that except for how it really really isn’t. There’s something low and rhythmic, drums which might be in his head or might be his heartbeat or might be from somewhere else altogether. Todd played enough electric guitar, fucked enough sound guys and girls, to know about things like reverb, and it's like somewhere the self-declared Next Big Thing has just pushed everything up to maximum.

"**It should not have gone that far.**"

And

"**Nothing trapped you.**"

And

"**He knows what's happening. I don't let him realise.**"

“What if we tried to tell him?” Dirk asks, somehow, although Todd isn’t sure how he can even form sentences with that drumming going on. “What if – hypothetically speaking, obviously – what if we said to him ‘hello the universe is speaking through you’?”

“**He would go mad**,” the universe says, “**and I would still speak through him, without allowing him the illusion. Telling him would be,**” it pauses, the pause you get in sci-fi movies before the explosion, “**cruel.**”

Todd, for want of a more flattering word, splutters at that. “How is that worse than what you’re doing?”

Those eyes turn on him. “**I gave him life. I am slowing down the degradation of his mind. I can’t be cruel anymore than I can be kind. Only you can do that.**”

It’s probably talking about everyone, but seeing himself not reflected despite the clear inkiness, Todd feels like the universe is talking directly to him.

\---

Like anywhere else he’s ever stayed for more than one night, It was just a matter of time before Todd passed out on the couch. With the shit that happens on their cases it should have happened after the very first one, only the universe doesn't tend to leave them near anything as comfortable as a couch when it's all over, and if there's a bed Dirk is heading there with the kind of single-mindedness you only get when you've grown up in a government facility. (Dirk can fall asleep anywhere. Actually anywhere. Todd thought this was typical, then he thought it was cute, and then Farah explained what it very strongly implied.) And when the person whose whole life is crazy still manages to change clothes and fall on a mattress like an actual adult, you maybe feel a bit grubby for not doing that too. Todd's always had a problem with peer pressure, so at least it's mostly positive now (that or a lemmings situation).

But movie nights are a thing, a thing that Todd spends most of his spare time planning seeing as he's not nearly so hot on films as he is on music and he’s increasingly aware that there’s a difference between what's genuinely good and what pretentious hot people at college said was good. It’s fine, though, he wants Dirk to relax and enjoy normal things. He wants to be normal for Dirk. He’s never actually wanted to be called normal before but he can be this, and there’s this way Dirk has of doing all the little things like microwaving popcorn and shouting commentary which can’t really be called anything but ‘charming’. He’s an alien in the world and Todd is his human, hopefully in a nice Tom Hanks way rather than a creepy most-other-‘80s-movies way.

Dirk heads up to bed – or over to bed, seeing as their apartment is over the office and takes up all of one floor. Language is weird. Todd's basically too lazy to move, swimming in a sea of alcohol and Harrison Ford crushes (he forgets how much the first Indiana Jones fucks him up, _how did he forget that_, Indy and Marion kissing melted his tiny kid brain like the Ark of the Covenant). He's only chilly in that he knows he did have the (ridiculous) length of Dirk all up his side and now that's gone, but otherwise it's still pretty warm in here. There's a blanket which is not Mona, and since nobody is looking Todd gives in and pulls it over himself. He'll move soon. Seriously.

He sinks down into the ocean. He doesn't remember closing his eyes but the room washes away into shadows, things lurking nearby that he couldn't see even if he wanted to. His brain won't let him. Instead he just knows where the things are, some sense he can't explain, knowing there are tendrils underfoot and something that's like seaweed but not draped all around him. He moves and something passes over his arm, something slimy except that's not the word for it. It's more like...blood. Maybe.

A light breaks overhead. He looks up, and it's the universe. Of course it's the universe. It was always going to be the universe.

He doesn't have Amanda with him this time. He slid backstage all by himself, and everything around him knows that. Then, half his attention was on her, and on saving at least one world if not two if they were lucky, and there was a part of him in pain if he only thought about it. He doesn't know where his body is now, or what it's doing. It doesn't matter.

The lights twist and burn overhead. In places there's darkness eating at them, a different darkness to the one coiling around him and hugging close. If it was that darkness he'd be dead already.

He knows this one could kill him too, but it wouldn't mean it. Not in the same way. That other darkness is grasping, devouring, and it's nothing.

The lights are pulling him on, and he looks closer at the universe, and closer. Something's whispering in his ear, except he doesn't have ears and it's not a whisper, and it's so much easier just to let it be than try to be human about it. Better to let it exist and happen.

It doesn’t mean to be cruel, and it isn’t. It’s thinking that makes it cruel.

\---

"Dirk, I – I really don't think you should be talking to him. Or them. Or however the universe has decided to identify itself, obviously I don’t want to assume." Farah had been less than impressed about meeting the universe. In fact she’d pulled her gun, which was super badass right up until Friedkin’s hand had reached out and pulled the trigger for her and then they all got to watch the hole closing back up again, black in the red looking uncomfortably like an infection.

"Seriously?" As much as Todd wants to endorse Farah agreeing with him, since that makes it actually the right thing to do, he's aware he has way more selfish motivations generally. "Don't you want, like. Information?" Todd is supposed to be the one making crazy irrational decisions here. Todd very much wants to toss Friedkin out the door and see how the universe handles crashing down the stairs. The whole point of Farah being here is to maybe stop him doing that.

"Todd," Farah says slowly, "either he is lying, in which case we cannot trust what he says, or he is telling the absolute truth, in which case we cannot comprehend anything he might say."

"You think he's lying?" Todd asks through some very vivid flashbacks to black ooze and knitting flesh.

"I said the absolute truth, Todd. Sparing us details makes sense."

"But doesn't that make you want to know?"

Farah hesitates. Her thumb runs along the edge of her belt, back and forth. A flash of white as she doesn't quite bite her lip. "There are some things we’re not supposed to know. I already had to deal with predestination and the existence of the supernatural this year, Todd, I’m not in a rush. Besides,” she adds, “we have other things to worry about, it sounds like.”

Todd glances at the carpet – or rather, where the carpet used to be. "I'm worried about him."

"But he does at least seem to be on our side, which is a plus for us," she says. "And what he says about 'nothing', I don't know, but Priest – " Her mouth presses shut in a line, and Todd might not see Dirk shudder but he swears he can feel the air vibrating with it.

"**You will never meet him,**" the universe had said, when Farah had asked what exactly all this ‘nothing’ talk actually meant. "**Not the way you meet people. Or anything else in me.**"

"You saw him, at the hospital,” Farah goes on. “At the house, he walked straight up to me and – " The air whooshes out of her. Her eyes are wide, looking at but not seeming to see the patch of surviving carpet by Todd's feet. With that expression, Todd really doesn't want to know what she's actually seeing.

She takes a few breaths, the kind Todd remembers from Amanda drowning; from Farah talking him through an attack; from trying to keep Dirk going. "I think I'm doing a fairly good job at handling all of...this," she circles her fingers in the air helpfully, "but Todd, he – I fought a wizard who could control my body, and I am more scared of him."

"Why?"

Dirk's hand catches in the back of his shirt as Farah blinks at him. "You...saw him, Todd."

"Yeah," Todd says slowly. Okay, he remembers being scared, but that's pretty standard for him. Someone coming at Dirk with a gun, someone who scares Dirk that much? Obviously he's going to be more focused on Dirk. Same about shooting himself too, also obviously. "Lots of people have shot at me, Farah."

Dirk's hand tightens, making him look around. "He's different, Todd," he murmurs. "He's like – " He swallows audibly, pained like poison. "He's not like me at all. He's the exact opposite."

"Um," Todd says wisely. "You don't seem much alike?" He figures that must at least be reassuring.

"What the universe said. I didn't – I knew there was something terrible about him. Saying he's the same but different – it makes sense." Dirk says it with the same resignation that had sat in him when he’d gone to lie on the bed in Francis’ room. "At Blackwing, I didn't know what he was doing. I just – " He swallows again, then again, and he's shaking so hard that Todd just spins and grabs him, holding him, willing him to believe that he's safe.

"The Mage was evil," Farah says, "as much as I _really_ don't like using that word. Priest, though – I don't think he much cares about things like that. I don't think there's a person there to care."

Without wanting it to happen, Todd finds the dreams settling into his head again as he holds Dirk there. About the sense of everything, so full that the self vanishes. A pull towards something, being _something_. The longing. Something missing so long as there is anything else. Who you are doesn't matter, so long as you're part of it.

Friedkin's dead, but it never quite feels like it. The more Todd tries to remember the hospital, the harder it gets to picture anything about the man chasing them. Or, not 'picturing him' exactly: Todd's got a surprisingly vivid image, like a perfect snapshot, a man with a gun coming at them with a grin. But it...looks like a picture. Everything else has sound, feeling, but the more he tries to think of Priest, the more the memory flattens out, first into a photograph and then a drawing: still lifelike, but that's all.

The more he tries, the more the life washes out, and there looming in his head is nothing. Not a person. A cave drawing, scrawled and terrified, of absolutely nothing.

\---

"Can't you go sit creepily on your own in the dark? Shouldn't that be your thing?"

Todd’s fairly certain his dreams are getting worse. He wakes up covered in nail marks, like he's been clawing at his skin, and the lights are too bright and his mouth tastes of blood and smoke. Last night he woke up with his knees ground into the carpet, his fingers splayed against the wall, jaw aching like he'd been screaming. At first all he could think was _Dirk_ and the ache of a chasm which swallowed stars.

Todd doesn't much want to talk to the universe, but at least that's something he has conscious control over. There is nothing accidental about wanting to punch that body full in the face, and also he has managed to resist that urge because he's genuinely afraid of what would happen if he did. What if Friedkin’s just a water balloon filled with black goo? 

Todd used to be the sort of person who said that whatever you could imagine was worse than reality. Just because he only relatively recently started thinking thousands of ants were eating him doesn't change the fact that he grew up in a family where those conversations just happened. Now, though, he can safely say the universe will always find something worse. That was already the case, and whatever..._noun_ has happened to Friedkin has not exactly improved on that (sort of like throwing fire at bleach, which isn’t entirely appropriate but is what Todd is considering doing to his brain to get some of the images out).

No need to blink with those black egg yolk eyes. No need to do anything, and it's so quiet here that Todd doesn't hear a heartbeat either. No need for anything unnecessary. He wonders if he'd feel it if it was happening to him. He didn't last time, backstage.

"**When you saw the truth of me,**" the voice says. "**Where did you think you were standing?**"

"Outside."

"**You existed in something. Your sister stopped the pain I brought by taking you outside, into nothing.**"

Call it the honeyed substance to the words, so that thoughts stick to them, but he finds himself saying, "You said that nothing had Dirk."

"**Yes**."

"You meant a thing, right?"

"**No existence you would recognise. The opposite. Where you could go and feel nothing, just echoes from me. Order in nothingness. Clean.**"

"The bad guys?" His lips barely form the words, pure sound, but somehow he doesn't think he's being heard with those ears.

"**The opposite of me.**"

Todd blinks slowly; draws up his hand like it's someone else's, to push across his eyes to clear them. When he presses, there's red lightning. "Is that what's in me?"

"**No. It never will be.**"

\---

Todd has never been a fan of seeing people get hurt.

Sure, he likes hearing about other people having a bad day, because he's either kind of an asshole that way or just human depending on who you ask. That doesn't mean he enjoys seeing it in real life, beyond planted squibs and melted prosthetics. It's even worse now that the disease in his head turns all those tortures onto him, so that he knows how it feels to burn alive or have his skin eaten by bugs. That's his shiny new life.

But. Todd can deal. Most of the time.

Friedkin, though – or the thing that wears Friedkin, or that speaks through him, or whatever the fucking deal is there? The complete fucking idiot who came into their lives with nothing but dumb bitch energy, eyes with morphing pupils, and a tendency to exhale black dust that seriously does not get out of your clothes? Todd has decided he will go a long way to make sure he never sees that dude get hurt, ever again.

Lucky for the truck driver that apparently brute force trauma still acts the same when hitting a human shape. He got to drive on none the wiser, or at least Todd assumes so from what didn't even seem like that much speeding up afterwards. None of that luckiness for them though, watching a body stand up with neck bent at a right angle, arms more than that, legs twisted in a way a fucking doll would be proud of. Todd has a little sister, he's seen what happens to dolls, and nothing Amanda wrought on the Barbies from Aunt Mandy could possibly match up to this.

Friedkin's blood isn't even red anymore. Todd's not sure what color you'd call it. It's hard when you can't look right at it. Closest he can think of is those shitty '3D' comics, the ones where wearing the flimsy cardboard glasses were supposed to make the image leap right out at you. The way your eyes strained looking at the normal page’s red and blue outlines and trying to make sense of them. That, but void.

The universe seems kind enough to twist Friedkin back into shape, or maybe not so much kind as feeling that there's no point in having a human vessel when they don't look human. That's 'kind' in terms of intention, because there's nothing kind about hearing a spine crack back into shape. Todd doesn't know whether it's worse to watch or not, focusing on Dirk holding his hand so hard that it's hard to even start on an 'is this platonic' downward spiral through the feeling of his knuckles grinding together. The sounds are pretty awful, but even a brain as diseased and full of R movies as Todd's can't imagine stuff worse than watching it. At least Judge Doom was animated.

"That guy hit me," Friedkin says. How, Todd couldn't say, when his jaw hasn't quite aligned yet. There's a flash of tongue and it doesn't make him think of 'flesh' so much as 'trench'.

“I got the plates,” Farah says, because of course she did.

"You want him to apologise?" Todd asks, fully aware that his voice is stretched into hysterical pitches even time travel and Wendimoor didn't manage and really not caring by this point. This isn't even nuts anymore. Todd had resigned himself to living in some kind of surreal fantasy, but not a horror movie.

Friedkin looks down at himself; holds up a hand and wiggles his fingers, making a 'huh' noise as they bend fully backwards. "I’m okay?"

"That's," Todd says before he knows what it actually is. "That's not the word I'd use?"

"He's functioning." Honestly, Todd knows that Farah is totally badass, but for once can't she just freak out a little bit? Not in an anxiety way, that's distressing and pretty mean, but just 'holy shit the pancake got up again' kind of way.

"Yeah," Friedkin says, and, "**Yes,**" at the same time.

Dirk doesn’t say anything. But Todd can feel his fingers moving too.

\---

"Todd?"

Todd opens his eyes.

There's a door open in front of him. In the doorway is Dirk, hair bed-mussed but eyes quite quickly coming to full life. He's in some distractingly spotted pyjamas, possibly because Todd's brain keeps drawing shapes between the dots the way he used to do with TV static when that was a thing, and the shapes he's making don't look right at all. It's like the stuff covering Dirk's body is writhing before his eyes.

"Todd?" Dirk asks again, and long kinda-British fingers are wrapping around his biceps. "What did you want?"

He really doesn't know.

"I think I'm going crazy."

Dirk hums against his hair. Todd would object to the hugging and general bodily contact but honestly he's way too scared to worry about that masculine bullshit and the chances of completely accidental erections are pretty low when your brain wakes up screaming like this.

"How do you know?"

"I don't," Todd says. "But it feels like that should be what this is." He scowls into Dirk's shoulder because no matter how much he tries, he can't figure out what the right order for those words even is. Like emptying out one of those boxes of fridge magnets and finding that none of them are actual sentences because that's not quirky enough. "What do you think?"

Dirk doesn't laugh, but his voice tightens in this way that Todd knows means his mouth is pulling to the side, not smirking because that suggests a completely different person to Dirk but just smiling awkwardly (not in an awkward way, that looks different). "Are you asking me to judge the relativity of sanity, Todd?"

"Good point." Todd sighs. He keeps his eyes shut, sort of enjoying the contact and the dark and trying to focus on that rather than the dreams or the sleepwalking or the screaming or anything else. They move back into Dirk’s room, which would normally send Todd’s mind whirling except it’s already occupied. Same for when they sit on the edge of Dirk’s bed: Todd just pushes and Dirk holds him closer. "Just – I have pararibulitis. Isn't that enough?" Dirk tenses under him. "Not like – I deserve that, I do, and it's not the same thing but – Doesn't my brain pull enough shit?"

He sits back abruptly, accidentally jerking Dirk that way too when he doesn't let go in time. "Holy shit. Is this like the visions? Is this what happened to Amanda?"

Dirk frowns. "Did she say it happened like this?"

"Well, no, but maybe – What else would it be?" Okay, he's getting a little excited now, because maybe this doesn't have to be a bad thing. Amanda came back from Wendimoor as a badass witch freedom fighter, so clearly there are positives here. Dirk looks much less excited but he doesn't have that expression which suggests he thinks Todd is having a freakout so that has to be progress. Okay, Todd would like him to look a little less calm because that's pretty unsettling on Dirk, but he can work with the absence of actual concern. "Dirk, this could help you, right? The cases? If I got visions? Maybe I could help!"

Dirk's eyes slide to the side. "Todd, I don't really – "

"No, but think about it!" Dirk flinches as Todd practically lunges forward, hands on his thighs, but holy shit this is starting to make sense. "Why else would the universe put me here, right?"

Shit. Todd can see the way Dirk's mouth twists at that, his hand lifting off the bed towards him but then falling back. Keep talking, right? Just keep talking. "Obviously I'm your friend too, Dirk, but why me, right? Why pick me?"

"I did," Dirk muttered.

"But it's the universe, right? It's always the universe."

Suddenly long fingers ball themselves up into fists in his t-shirt, and Dirk gets this look, this wild look which just snaps through all of it because holy shit, is Dirk going to hit him? Dirk's never seemed the type – which honestly is pretty refreshing compared with every other man Todd's managed to insult repeatedly in his life – but then he doesn't tend to look so much like a trapped animal. Todd goes still. He closes his mouth.

"The universe – " Dirk chokes a little. "The universe didn't choose you, Todd. I did."

"But it was on a case," Todd says, then wonders why the fuck he's speaking. Is it seriously that hard for him to just not talk? For five seconds? "And there was that time loop and – "

"I called you my best friend," Dirk says. "I did that. I met you on a case but you stayed, Todd, and you were – "

Not for the first time in an awkward emotional situation, Todd wishes he'd learnt lip-reading. He never does, no matter how often this happens, and this won't be any different, but that won't stop him chewing out his past self for not taking a few minutes in between being a lying shithead to work this out. Dirk's mouth moves there, starts to say something, something about _him_, and Todd doesn't have the slightest clue what it is. Actually, that's not entirely true: he does think it's something important.

"Dirk?"

"I just wanted a friend," Dirk muttered. "It couldn't let me have that."

"What?" Todd asks, although he thinks this might actually be a 'who'. "Dirk, I'm going to need you to actually explain what you're talking about."

Dirk looks at him, really looks at him, and, well – 

There's this thing. It doesn't happen often, either because Dirk is currently being ridiculous or because he's just been so ridiculous that Todd can't possibly take him seriously ever, but sometimes – sort of like in the Bergsberg police station, the weight of the universe and all – sometimes it's like someone much older is looking out through Dirk's eyes. Not like with Francis, who just knew a lot but still spoke like a child. Like something's worn out, not pre-worn but the kind that takes decades.

"I'm sorry," Dirk says, and Todd finds he isn't surprised to hear it.

\---

The sun's so warm, so novel in this city where it usually keeps on raining all day and night. Dirk's chasing a lead with Farah round the back of the diner and really Todd knows that he should be joining in too but it's like this laziness washes over to drown him, heavy enough that it's like he can feel it pushing down on his eyelids and the world blurs when he tries to see clearly because his eyes won't stop rolling back though. Warmth refracting through dirty glass and light pouring over him.

At first he didn't think he was dreaming at all. Thoughts swimming around in the ink. Saying he could feel it seemed incredibly inadequate, like talking about the taste of sound or the scent of sight. Different senses. You can do that, in dreams.

That sense tells him that he's moving, even though his body is barely there. When he looks down he can see it, but it shimmers in and out of view and stretches weirdly in places. He can't say exactly what's wrong with the picture, he just knows that something's off. The image he's trying to project of himself doesn't match what he's seen before – like drawing a shape, picking out a song on the guitar, and your brain sparking with wrongness.

It's much easier when he stop picturing himself.

The world gets dark red, then bright, colours washing in like sunrise. Someone's watching him, and rather than trying to choose a name or something, he just accepts that they're there.

"Are you in there?" he asks, words slurring together like dripping honey, spilled cheap liquor seeping across the table and sticking to the floor.

Clammy cold fingers tapping against his head. It's weird – nothing elaborate, just weird, that's why the word exists – remembering that he actually has a head. "**I'm in everything.**"

"Not what I asked."

Friedkin’s face ripples like water after a stone. "**You’re going mad.**"

"Already am," Todd says, which sounded way more badass when Amanda used to trot it out every other visit. Her name sparks, _awake_, and as much as it drags down at him he tries to shake the dream away. Blinks and opens his eyes too wide and blinks again. Someone abandoned a bottle on the table and Todd’s grasping fingers find it, pressing in hard against the cold glass, something real.

"**Then sleep.**"

"So you can fuck around in my head?" Todd runs the bottle back and forth, then tries balancing it on its rim, finger carefully placed at the top of the neck as it spins around both slowly and wildly. Now it slips free and hits the floor and somehow doesn't break. Just rolls slowly away, hollowness echoing. Disappointed and angry, Todd scoffs, sitting up and back as if that stops anything and pushing his fingers as far as he can into his pockets (which is not all that far, really he should drop skinny jeans altogether because they really fuck up sulking). "You know I trust Dirk a lot more than I trust you, right?"

"**He doesn't mean to do it to you.**"

Todd pauses. "You mean trust?"

The universe doesn't do expressions, but Todd still gets a cosmic sense of receiving a Look.

"**Proximity. Empathy, in emotion and mind. He does nothing intentionally, and that includes meeting you.**"

"No." The chair does not scrape as he stands up, which he resents, but he tries slamming his hands on the table instead to punctuate the fact that he is really really fucking angry. The fire burns away the darkness, just a little. Not literal fire, and for a moment Todd realises that he hasn’t had an attack in weeks. Not awake. "You don't – You don't take credit for it."

The universe says, "**It's a statement of reality. A fact.**"

"You just wanted him to have an assistant."

"**Yes,**" it says, then, "**In everything.**"

Now is a really fucking terrible time to get embarrassed. "Well, that's just creepy."

"**I let you decide that,**" it says. A tremor begins in its side; the left arm suddenly goes limp; the head drops to the side at the sort of angle that would send Nearly Headless Nick running for his ghostly mother. Just like that, Todd is looking at an abandoned doll, eyes first blank and then welling with ink.

Then just as abruptly, the body snaps back together. The whites of the eyes return, just an excuse around the edges but still there.

"**He wanted to communicate. Nothing is coming and a voice would be useful. All must perform their function, this time.**"

There's a whole lot Todd should be picking apart there – loads of exposition shit, the kind they usually only get when at least one of them bleeding out and there's a lot more screaming going on. Dirk would have so many questions; Farah would have so many different questions.

But Todd's thing is still that he is the most selfish guy you'll meet.

"And me?"

Contorted fingers tap on the table, no rhythm a person would every pick out. Like with everything else, you can't say exactly what's wrong about it – it's just tapping, for fuck's sake – but it sets off the wrong resonance in your head. Something vibrating down your spine.

Inkblot eyes envelop him.

\---

In the beginning, the universe created itself. Humans might regard this as a bad move, but ants say the same thing about clingfilm, and to a human an ant is far less interesting than the atoms which compose it.

The universe, encompassing all things, has witnessed the birth and death of life _ad absurdum_. Humans, boasting a mere 4.543 billion years' worth of evolution, shouldn’t register, but as with all jokes timing is everything. 

Everything is inside the universe. Nothing is outside. And nothing hates to be alone.

Creating isn't in their purview; instead they deal in whispers. A frequency detected by brainwaves, and a religion is born. A whisper to the weather and the land is reformed. It's easy when a species is so eager to listen, leaning out into space with the whole of themselves open without horror. As if they weren't soft and fragile, without so much as brittle shells to protect them.

The universe could be called kind by those to invented the word. Sewing chaos into patterns, passing judgement, the sort of things you might want a god to do. Never mind that it has little to do with individuals. The stitching is made up of many threads, and all that matters is the whole.

The nothing could equally be called evil because human language is limited. Without words the concept does not exist for them. The absence of good must be evil; it couldn't possibly be mere absence. You couldn’t have opposed absences. 

Comprehension changes all living beings. The universe seeded comprehension in just a few, enough to change shapes or reality. They all changed differently.

Comprehension of nothing breaks them just as much. Their eyes open and nothing is there. It takes everything, annihilates, leaves them breathing death because life has become the abomination. Some humans offer themselves up for that sort of thing, which is the surest way of keeping it away. There's too much of a sense of self in wanting it, and which leaves too little left afterwards to be of any use. It consumes anyway, shits out melted flesh, devours the way only a black hole can. Meets minds which bring nothing, accept nothing, and merges.

A black hole can smile. An abyss can laugh. Expand the consciousness beyond its limits; fill it with nothing but the need to spit out the light.

You can't call the absence a sin or a fault. The universe, though – the universe keeps you whole, to pour everything inside and mix together. No empty vessels because it needs to interact, to shape itself, to follow the rivulets of your mind lest it burst free and overflowing. Force itself into human shapes, squeezing through into forms it can present. Urges; thoughts; a feeling; a hunch. Find the minds which can take it. Why should it care about a normal life? Isn't it enough that it cares about life at all? Not that it does, in specifics. The ones it guides do the feeling, which creates the flaws, but there's only so much the universe can do before burning out the parts it needs.

It never had someone offered up the way Friedkin was, ready and waiting. A host, a centre, a man who should be dead, so hollow the body out as his mind goes what humans would call mad. Expanding horizons past sanity.

The nothing fills completely and utterly and burns out the rest. Something – a human, given the usual tools – contains everything with far less ease. 

Of course, there's nothing to say that something as vast, as absolute as the universe couldn't contain itself within more than one person. There’s always plenty to spill over: out the mouth, out the eyes, out the mind. Especially when the mundane limitations of the physical, the quaking atoms bound together so that pushing will just break them and the form they believe in. Everything is connected, but the smaller forms have their limits. Barriers they could collapse, only if they want to be something new.

Easier to build a place somewhere else. Not a host exactly, but a body, a collection of atoms with a compatible mind. All minds are compatible, really, but it's harder when trying to preserve the sanity.

The universe doesn't need Dirk to like it, but free will is an assurance.

The universe should not break this one.

\---

If Todd told the truth about himself, to himself – if he had anything solid to himself other than the knowledge that he's an asshole and the deep unremitting mental bassline of self-loathing which comes with that – if Todd Brotzman could ever have faith in his feelings again (beyond the screaming fear and hysterical laughter at survival, those are just biological), that anything about him is real and not one reveal away from another hallucination, _if all that was true_, then maybe, _maybe_, he'd say that he sort of kind of might be a little bit in love with Dirk.

Okay, just thinking about it makes it feel like the world is smearing at the edges. His hands grip the sides of his head like that'll hold it all together.

It's easy to say that Dirk is the centre of his universe. Honestly, Dirk might be the centre of the universe generally, the universe went and got a body to talk to him, but Todd can actually feel the pull in his gut as he revolves around him, in faster and tighter circles. Amanda can fly off into the world in a van with a bunch of strangers and end up a witch, but Todd's just Todd and he's terrified.

He's terrified because of how easy it is not to be terrified.

Dirk finds him so easily, grounds him so easily, something fixed for Todd, someone who needs him but who Todd can never seem to quite let down enough for it to be all over. Which is good, because if Dirk left now Todd would just tip over. He can feel it, how precariously balanced he is, every little bit of him. He'd spin out into nothingness; into a jumble of mixed metaphors without a person going crazy to hold them together.

Yeah, he was scared about the sleepwalking, the clawing, but the more it sits there in his head the more it just feels inevitable. The same as Amanda walking out. This was always where Todd's life would end up.

There's something in Dirk – or more likely Dirk _is_ something, because it's not just the universe pushing him. Dirk knows things. Dirk sees things. Dirk's freaked by the universe showing up with a voice, not because of what happened to Friedkin to manage that. Not once, when Todd's been trying to explain the dreams, has Dirk ever looked like he doesn't know what Todd's talking about.

Fuck. He looks like when Todd thought he'd figured out the time loop.

Todd gets the dreams from somewhere. The universe, maybe, but he only started getting them recently. Pararibulitis, then dreams. The backstage of the universe, and Dirk. Since Todd started sleeping one room away.

They haven't even kissed and Dirk's all there, inside Todd's head. Dirk might not feel the same, might not even feel that sort of stuff, and Todd realises he'd be fine with that. Him: Todd Brotzman, selfish asshole extraordinaire (which could honestly be his stagename if he wanted). The guy who wanted people to be clingy so he could be dismissive. Now, ever since that car trunk popped open and Dirk rolled back into his life, he knows he never wants anything else. Being apart was hell the first time, but every day this gets worse – or better, maybe. Like he's not his own person anymore, but just a sort of limb for Dirk to use. Not that Dirk would put it that way, but that's not the point.

He doesn't get hunches or visions or anything like that. He might one day, though – or he won't, but they'll happen to him.

Friedkin's body can't hold together forever. The universe won't want to keep trying.

For Dirk's sake, Todd locks the bedroom door and piles up the blankets on the floor for when he wakes up on his knees. Maybe he'll say something so they can sleep closer – it's not like Dirk has anything like the hang-ups which might get in the way. The metal of the lock is starting to pulse through the dreams and Todd knows he's going to break it one of these days.

He just wants to lie next to Dirk and know that they're dreaming the same things.

Dreaming the universe inside his head.


End file.
